Dickens

Ingmar Bergman’s mysterious and terrifying family drama has a realist structure shaken by tremors of supernatural revelation; it is now rereleased for its 40th anniversary in its three-hour theatrical cut (as opposed to the aggregate five hours of Bergman’s originally intended television version). This is maybe Bergman’s most personal film, inspired by a childhood dominated by his formidable and forbidding Lutheran minister father, Erik. Bergman had an older brother and a younger sister, novelist Margareta Bergman, and I…

At the start of this heartfelt exercise in hero worship, Nick Hornby gathers together a throng of what he calls “My People” and ushers them into a VIP room in his head. They make up an eclectic pantheon, with Arsène Wenger jostling Joan Didion and the sitcom scriptwriters Galton and Simpson next to the gloomy painter Edward Hopper. Dickens and Prince are “two among many” in the gilded crowd, but Hornby singles them out for special homage. Dickens rescued him from the stupor of adolescence by showing that books were an…

In its heyday, Longmont’s Dickens 300 Prime restaurant and Opera House was a place where people enjoyed coming to work. “It was really laid-back. It was really fun,” said former server Kristina Ball. “There weren’t too many problems, to be honest … everyone seemed to get along.” Katie Drexler, the restaurant’s former head server and trainer, worked alongside friends as well as family — her parents, Bill and Danielle Lusk, were the executive chef and the general manager, respectively. And Drexler and her parents said the…

It’s very naughty to ask about Santa’s privacy policy.Photo: Roman Samborskyi (Shutterstock)It’s hard to believe, but 2022 is almost over, and that means it’s time to start thinking about holiday shopping. If gadgets are on your shopping list this year, you might want to consider that when you give a tech gift you’re also giving a present to the tech industry: mountains of your loved-ones’ personal data. Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, just released a privacy-minded holiday gift guide examining the data…

It’s a brave writer who takes on a retelling of Dickens, and of David Copperfield, the most personal of his novels, at that. And yet the American author Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead – which transposes this very English, quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman to her own home territory of Appalachia – feels in many ways like the book she was born to write.The idealism and concern with social justice that are characteristic of Kingsolver’s worldview find their natural counterpart in Dickens’s impassioned social…

If your first reaction to the subject matter of Nick Hornby’s new book is a perplexed “Huh?”, you might take comfort in knowing its author had similar feelings. In superficial terms, his yoking together of two cultural giants – the novelist Charles Dickens and musician Prince Rogers Nelson – seems unusual given they operated not just in different media but different centuries. While both found fame early and died in their 50s, the bare bones of their biographies are otherwise wildly different. Before beginning his…

Last year in the US, opioids were involved in more than 80,000 overdose deaths, representing yet another hike in an epidemic that began in the mid-1990s and shows no signs of abating. Fury at the now well-documented role big pharma played in its creation ripples through Barbara Kingsolver’s charged new novel, a hillbilly coming-of-age saga that seizes from its opening line.“First, I got myself born,” announces its protagonist, Damon Fields – no mean feat given that his addict mother, little more than a child herself, is…

Most people will do a double-take on hearing the premise of your new book – it’s such a novel idea that Charles Dickens and Prince are from the same mould.Well, I didn’t worry too much about someone coming out with the same book just before mine.Have you always been a Prince fan?I was aware of him from the first album onwards and then I went to see him at this incredible show at Wembley Arena in the mid-80s, a sort of funk review with 15 people on stage and no gaps between the songs, one segued into another. It was…

A batch of Charles Dickens’s letters that have remained unseen and unpublished are to go on display for the first time.The 11 letters include assorted invitation notes and offer insights into the author’s reading habits and writing projects as well as details about a trip to Switzerland written to a friend.In a letter dated 10 February 1866, Dickens, the author of classics including Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield, complains about the loss of a Sunday postal service and threatens to move away from…